Course Offerings

This introductory course to our popular Innov8x course (INNO 444/544) , allows underclassmen the opportunity to learn about problem solving through innovation, thus triggering and developing their entrepreneurial mindset early. *Offered in fall (3 semester hours)

Innov8x introduces concepts and tools to accelerate the design, validation and adoption of innovations in support of creative problem solving. Using an entrepreneurial mindset, we learn how to identify and frame problems that beneficiaries and stakeholders face. We attempt to design and test practical solutions to those problems in collaboration with those who experience the problems. We apply beneficiary discovery, pretotyping, business model design (social, economic and environmental), constrained creativity, efficient experimentation, and rapid iteration. While resolving challenges involves technical solutions, an important aspect of this course is directly engaging beneficiaries and stakeholders in social contexts to develop solutions with strong impact potential. Innov8x is grounded in collaborative creativity theory at the intersection of organizational behavior (social psychology), design principles, entrepreneurship and innovation management. *Offered in spring.

Prerequisite: None (3 semester hours)

This course is offered in collaboration with the Data Science program under the auspices of the McNeil Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. This course meets cocurrently with the existing Innov8x Create course 444 for the first five weeks. *Offered in spring (1 semester hour)

For fall, summer and spring semesters, our lab class, Innov8x Studio, will be offered as an intensive Innov8X extension for the continuation of projects, and a summer residency program for teams to develop innovative solutions to problems they have identified in a market or in their own organization. Launch your startup or innovation initiative and gain traction. Scholarships available. *For more information contact the McNeil Center

Prerequisite: Any introductory entrepreneurship course. (1-3 lab hours depending on the commitment)

Courses Outside Innov8x

(I) Effective leaders contribute significantly to their organizations performance. When they take advantage of a technological innovation or respond to a crisis, leaders rely on critical skills to communicate their vision and coordinate tasks performed by others. This course is about developing your unique leadership skills and style whether you lead a small engineering team or, eventually, a large global corporation. We review key theories of leadership and examine the lessons learned from those who applied them. We synthesize and translate these lessons into specific behaviors that enhance your ability to lead. We discuss how generational shifts, economic and political factors impact the workplace in ways that call for effective, quality leadership. Ultimately, you have to understand how to lead and motivate individuals who don’t look or think like you. This may involve motivating followers and involving them in making decisions. Following a learning-by-doing approach, we complement class discussions and case studies with a hands-on simulation of a leadership team facing a series of crises.

(3 hours lecture; 3 semester hours)

This course introduces students to the entrepreneurial mindset, focusing on the concepts, practices, and tools of the entrepreneurial process. Students practice the process of exploring interesting problems and developing creative ideas to address them. An entrepreneurial mindset is useful for tackling new opportunities or challenges in any business, government, non-profit and life in general. The only effective way to acquire an entrepreneurial mindset is to practice it. This course takes an experiential approach: You are expected to start a new venture and be an active participant in the learning process. You interact with the beneficiaries and partners as you initiate and validate your ideas and hypotheses. Your active participation and engaged presence is required.

Prerequisite: Intense curiosity (3 hours lecture; 3 semester hours)

This course leads students through the process of developing and validating a business model for an innovative product or service by a start-up or an established organization. The creation of a business model can be challenging, frustrating, fascinating and fulfilling. Building on skills learned in EBGN360, students explore ways to sustain and scale a promising new product or service in any context: commercial/for-profit, social/non-profit or government. It is an iterative process that involves uncovering beneficiary needs and leads to an in-depth understanding of how value is delivered, differentiated and captured. Students work in teams since new ventures are started by teams with complementary skills and a shared purpose. This is a demanding, hands-on course that integrates knowledge from entrepreneurship, business, economics and engineering classes. Students are expected to initiate and drive an intense beneficiary discovery process that involves reaching out to beneficiaries and engaging them outside class.

Prerequisites: EBGN360 (3 hours lecture; 3 semester hours) 

This course provides a scientific approach to developing and marketing new products which are often critical to the success of firms competing in technology based industries. We will start with an overview of core marketing and then develop prototypes of a new product design. We will step through the new product development process in detail, learning about available tools and techniques to execute each process step along the way. New product prototypes will be used to gather data from prospective target markets and assess the viability of the design in the marketplace. 

Prerequisites: EBGN360 (3 hours lecture; 3 semester hours) 

(I, II) This class will equip students with the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to identify, define, and begin solving real problems for real people, within the socio-technical ambiguity that surrounds all engineering problems. The course will focus on problems faced in everyday life, by people from different backgrounds and in different circumstances, so that students will be able to rise to the occasion presented by future workplace challenges. By the end of this course, students will be able to recognize design problems around them, determine whether they are worth solving, and employ a suite of tools to create multiple solutions. The follow up course –“Design for People” — will enable students to take the best solutions to the prototype phase.

(3 hours lecture; 3 semester hours)